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Saturday, 6 April 2013

Pictures speak louder than words, yes, but words help to convey the message more effectively.

There are numerous tools for manipulating images to achieve a desired effect but in this post I am going to write only about one way of working with images, i.e. adding text to an image.

All the web tools mentioned in this post have two things in common (and for this reason they are great to use with students):
1) they are free of charge,
2) they do not require registration.
Needless to say, anyone can cope with uploading an image (or borrowing it from the internet) and adding a text box to the image, so I won't write any instructions how to do it.

The picture above which shows me in my classroom was made with the help of Pinwords tool. Easy and fast!

These are my students photographed a while ago. The image on the left was worked with BeFunky,
but the image on the right with PicMonkey.

My students again. I used Roflbot for the picture on the left and Picfont for the picture on the right.

A moment caught at the lesson. The image manipulation tool is Picadilo.

Finally, check out Pixlr which was used for adding text to the image above. The picture was taken in Iceland this February.

Why would a teacher or a student want to use this image editing feature?

First and foremost, once you add some text to the image, you instantly get a short story. By putting many images together, you create a longer story. By putting all student stories together, you get a class book!Thus this method can be successfully used in storytelling. Students can use their own drawings too, not only photos. This method is indispensable for creating comics.

Images with a written message serve well in presentations, especially if a student is not very voluble.
A caption inserted in the picture helps the viewers to understand the author's attitude or the idea of a snapshot.